Never too much to learn about trademarks, branding, and the law.

Google’s new brand as of September 1, 2015. This sixth iteration is the most drastic change since Google’s third iteration, moving from a serif typeface “Catull” to a sans typeface “Product Sans”, created by Google as part of the rebrand. The update will help their brand visibility on mobile devices, keeping in step with global internet usage patterns. Also see the “G” and “ellipses” logos below.The fifth iteration was used from September 2013 until the most recent rebranding.The 4th iteration saw a change from the yellow “o” to an orange one and was used from May 2010 to September 2013.At the time the 3rd iteration was released it was a significant rebranding for Google, bringing it out of a web 1.0 design.In its first rebranding Google found the color scheme which is still embodied in the current logo. It also experimented with an exclamation point (Yahoo! anyone?) in this late 1998 version.This was the first logo used by Google when it launched in 1998. A few months later they worked on the color scheme and added an exclamation mark.

Other touch-ups have also been made to help Google bolster its branding. The moves are towards a more visually cohesive look, with the “G” in Product Sans typeface logo replacing the older blue tab with a lowercase “g” in a serif typeface. I’ve notice that many of the implementations are already in place since the announcement less than 24 hours ago, a sign of a well executed rebranding effort.

For the most detailed information, please see Google’s design page with more about how they did the rebranding and how it will work for them in the future.

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After applying for a trademark, brand owners often receive Office Actions from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) stating that their mark is not inherently distinctive and that they can choose to amend their application to the “Supplemental Register”. This frequently occurs to brand owners applying for a trademark with a brand name which has not been screened by a trademark lawyer, which ultimately can lead to a loss of their time and money invested into a trademark application. However, amending an application to the Supplemental Register may be an option for brand owners to not entirely lose their investment.

In the U.S. trademark system, a brand can be registered on either the Principal or Supplemental Register at the USPTO. The Principal Register is preferred for its stronger and more extensive protections, but the Supplemental Register has many benefits. The former is a register for distinctive trademarks, and registration there means the full force of trademark law is behind it. The Supplemental Register holds marks which do not quite meet the “distinctiveness” requirements of the Principal Register, but are also not completely generic and devoid of any value. In a sense, the Supplemental Registration holds marks that aren’t currently distinctive, but may someday grow into something strong enough to be registered on the Principal Register once they can prove “secondary meaning”, that is, to demonstrate that it has acquired distinctiveness in the relevant market segment.

Registration of a brand on the Supplemental Register can help a brand:

block registration of brands which are similar to its own

gain federal recognition of a brand which is otherwise not capable of being registered. This means the owner can use a Supplemental Registration as the basis to bring a lawsuit for trademark infringement in federal court

by allowing it to use the ® symbol next to the brand, which means that the brand is registered with the USPTO

gain protection on the Principal Register in the future, which is often the case for “inherently non-distinctive” brand indicators such as personal names, descriptive words, and product shapes. After 5 years of Supplemental Registration, a brand owner can apply for registration of that mark on the Principal Registration by claiming that the brand on the Supplemental Register has become “distinctive” and thus meets the requirements (a Section 2(f) application)

Registration of a brand on the Supplemental Register can form the basis for registering a brand in a non-U.S. country even though it initially does not qualify for registration on the Principal Register. The Supplemental Register was developed in part to help U.S. companies with registering and protecting branding which didn’t qualify for U.S. registration, but which would nonetheless be protected in a foreign country so long as they were registered marks in the U.S.

To compare, registration on the Principal Register:

is prima facie evidence of the registrant’s exclusive right to use the mark

creates a presumption that the registration is valid

serves as constructive notice to potential trademark infringers

allows brand owners to access U.S. Customs and Border Protection resources to stop and seize importations which infringe on trademark rights

begins the a 5 year clock, after which the registered brand can achieve incontestable status

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Google’s entire company was restructured under a parent company called Alphabet. I really like the name, which I interpret as a clever suggestion that the parent company holds all the individual pieces which make up the entire set of technology for the company. Larry Page himself said he liked the name because “it means a collection of letters that represent language, one of humanity’s most important innovations, and is the core of how we index with Google search.” I picked up this story because I love technology and branding law, and because of the latter I did a quick trademark “clearance” search, much like I would do for a client. That search left me very curious as to the strategy behind the trademark team at Google, which I can only assume investigated the use of ALPHABET as their new brand (albeit it, just a holding company and not a consumer brand with consumer products).

Google’s legal restructuring a few days ago resulted in a holding company called Alphabet and splitting up Google into multiple independent subsidiaries which all fall under Alphabet. This was a huge move by the company to make it “cleaner and more accountable” and to allow subsidiaries to “prosper through strong leaders and independence”, as Mr. Page put it. In effect the services engaged in by Alphabet as a holding company would be business management and financial affairs services, services which fall under Classes 35 and 36 of the Nice Classification.

I’ve explained all this as a foundation to the fact that that German car company in some people may know about, BMW, owns the trademark for ALPHABET in Classes 35 and 36 in many jurisdictions. In my brief search, I found 18 trademark registrations for ALPHABET in Class 35 and/or 36 with coverage in at least 30 jurisdictions. When we expand that to include trademark registrations for ALPHABET in related goods/services that number moves to at least 46 jurisdictions.

In short, BMW has a strong interest in the ALPHABET name vis-à-vis Google’s ALPHABET, the latter of which clearly encroaches on BMW’s legal protection of ALPHABET. Under normal circumstances, a brand in BMW’s position would be advised to take legal action to fend off encroachments onto one’s brand. This might actually be the case for a hedge fund in New York called Alphabet Funds, whose founder has received phone calls from investors and friends saying things like “Google took your name.” Because Google’s Alphabet will engage in venture capital funding and asset management, it is not unlikely that there may be some competition between Google’s Alphabet and Alphabet Funds, which would be more than enough to trigger liability for Google from a trademark perspective.

My main curiosity is: what will BMW do and what have Google’s lawyers already done to address that? My first guess was that Google had a confidential agreement with BMW regarding the accepted usage of their respective brands, although that was dispelled during the writing of this blog by news reports that BMW’s spokesperson said they are looking into any trademark problems, but that there are no plans for litigation yet.

One could argue there is little risk of actual loss of business or profits if the brands continue acting as they are: BMW’s Alphabet is focused on the auto industry and all their services (finance, leasing, data collection, etc.) serve to corporate enterprises with vehicle fleets and Google’s Alphabet will merely contain self-branded projects within its basket. Even though the holding bin will contain auto-related brands, such as the Google Self-Driving Car Project, as far as these two ALPHABET brands go, they don’t exactly intersect. Additionally, any potential clients of either ALPHABET would be considered a sophisticated purchaser, which means that the threshold for a consumer to be likely to be confused (the trademark infringement standard) would be much higher than, for example, consumers of competing soft drink brands (those consumers buy products with much less thought and research than sophisticated financial/business services). This is a consideration against BMW. On the other hand, flooding a similar market with another ALPHABET brand, to the point where BMW’s www.alphabet.com website has seemingly crashed and remained down for days since the Google announcement definitely has some cognizable negative effect for BMW.

Alphabet may be a great name in and of itself, but trademark law favors the earlier user of a trademark when there is a later, similar mark used. In this case, “ALPHABET” is the brand name of an important part of BMW’s business, and even though the chance that someone would be confused between BMW and Google’s Alphabet, allowing Google to keep its Alphabet would necessarily mean a weakening of BMW’s Alphabet brand in a legal sense.

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I often advise clients to use the TM (for physical products) and the SM (for services) symbols next to their brand or product name. This serves many purposes, but mainly to tell the public that you consider that word/logo as your brand, as a “no trespassing sign” to competitors, and as evidence in any future litigation on trademark infringement. On the last two points, the TM/SM symbols prevent arguments of ignorance, for example, “We didn’t know that word/logo was a trademark”.

The circle ® symbol may only be used in the U.S. on trademarks which have been registered at the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). State trademark registration is insufficient. U.S. courts have also upheld the use of the ® symbol in the U.S. for trademarks already registered in another country. If you are a U.S. brand doing business outside of the country, be wary of countries with civil and even criminal penalties for using the ® symbol on a brand which is not registered in that country.

Use of the ® symbol is recommended when possible because it provides “actual notice” that a trademark is registered. Not using it won’t create an absolute defense for an infringer, however, in a suit for damages only damages and lost profits occurring after actual notice can be recovered. Besides using the ® symbol, actual notice is also given in a cease-and-desist letter, which could be another point in time from which damages/lost profits may be calculated. This means that if you receive a cease-and-desist letter about infringement of a mark, and you did not know of the existence of that mark prior to the letter, you may be able to limit your financial liability to the damages/lost profits occurring after you received the letter.

Takeaway: As a brand owner, use the TM and SM symbols next to your brand until it is registered as a trademark. After registration, use the ® symbol.

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This post will help guide you, a marketing professional or startup, in the development of a word(s) that will one day embody your client’s/company’s reputation to its target market. Legally speaking, some trademarks are stronger than others based purely on the word itself, and this post gets into what makes a certain word stronger or weaker in terms of trademark law. “Strong” words are given stronger protection, that is, protection over both a wider range of visual/aural variations as well as a wider range of related products/services.

Courts and the USPTO assess the strength of a trademark in terms of conceptual and commercial strength, the “two-prong” test:

Conceptual strength: This will be discussed in a future blog!

Commercial strength: the actual customer recognition at a point in time, usually at the time of registration or litigation.

A “crowded marketplace” will have an effect on the commercial strength of a trademark, and is directly related to how wide the scope of protection of a trademark is. A trademark which is, despite being distinctive in a general sense, may be considered weak where there are many trademarks within an industry or related industries with similar names. As a hypothetical example, first imagine a fitness tracker app which has a conceptually strong name: BUDDY AND BOD. Memorable right? It’s simple, to the point, suggestive about the product, and a Google search for that exact phrase turns up only a single result!

Now, let’s suppose that there are 10 fitness tracker app companies in the US, and 8 of those companies had the word BUDDY in their name. Quickly scanning through this list to find the brands BUDDY AND BOD and TOTSFIT, I think you’ll find that one of these two pops out more noticeably:

FIT BUDDY

BUDDYu

HEALTHY BUDDY

WORKOUT BUDDY

MOVINGLY

LEAN MEAN BUDDY

ATHLETI-BUDDY

BUDDY AND BOD

TOTSFIT

EVER BUDDY BETTER BODY

Do you feel that BUDDY AND BOD has a stronger mark than, let’s say TOTSFIT, in this market? Probably not. Taking this example, if you’re developing the 10th fitness tracker app in the U.S. and you have a name with the word BUDDY in it, not only are you are competing with all the other BUDDY-formative names, but you will have a difficult time enforcing your rights against any subsequent app-developers with a BUDDY in their name.

This would likely be considered a crowded market, and any trademark for a fitness tracker app containing the word BUDDY will have a weaker scope of protection than say, a very unusual, made-up term like TOTSFIT.

To illustrate how this might play out in a trademark infringement setting, I think TOTSFIT would be able to convince the USPTO or a court that the public may confuse the following with their own TOTSFIT: TOTFITFULLY, TOTSMITH, DOSEBIT, USFIT, and DOTSIT. Meanwhile, BUDDY AND BOD would probably have a more difficult task in convincing a court that customers would be confused by a competitor’s use of the brands BODY MIND BUDDY, BODYBUDDY, BUDDY AND SOUL, even though these are somewhat similar to their own BUDDY AND BOD.

The takeaway: developing a clever name for your brand is only a first step. The second step is to make sure that other competitors aren’t commonly using a part of your clever name. The third step, not discussed here, is having your proposed brand thoroughly cleared by a trademark lawyer trained in clearing brands before applying for trademark protection.

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Yet again a UDRP decision from WIPO demonstrates that the burden of proof for complainants requires detailed evidence to be submitted. In the decision over , an Indian travel agency website, the complainant had many facts in its favor:

it applied for registration of SHANTI (although curiously the WIPO panel stated the application was for SHANTI TRAVEL) in August 2009,

it claimed it had used the mark for travel arrangement services since at least 2005

it spent a “huge amount” of money on advertising

Respondent only began using the mark TRAVEL SHANTI since 2011:

Interestingly, despite these facts, the panel did not find that the complainants established that the respondents registered and used in bad faith, which may defined as any of the following:

respondent registered/acquired the domain in order to prevent the owner of a mark from reflecting their mark in a corresponding domain name, provided that the respondent has engaged in a pattern of such conduct

the respondent has registered the domain name primarily for the purpose of disrupting the business of a competitor

the respondent has intentionally attempted to attract, for commercial gain, Internet users to its website or other online location, by creating a likelihood of confusion with the complainant’s mark as to the source, sponsorship, affiliation, or endorsement of its website or location or of a product or service on its website or location

The panel also did not recognize the concept of constructive knowledge, in mentioning in its reasoning that the respondents stated they had no knowledge of the complainants trademark application, despite the fact that an active trademark application existed at the time the domain was purchased by respondents.

The takeaway here is that even where facts exist in the absolute sense, UDRP complainants must provide sufficient evidence to prove those facts. Since constructive knowledge may not be taken into account, complainants should try to find and submit evidence which demonstrate actual knowledge by the respondent of complainant’s mark prior to respondents registration of the contested domain name. Lastly, complainants should submit all evidence and law which lay out the legal rights of the respondent, whether that be the rights conferred to a trademark application/registration owner and/or common law rights. If the Panel clearly understands the legal rights owed to a complainant, it makes it easier for them to make a determination favorable to the complainant where the rights are otherwise unclear, keeping in mind that Panelists are not always familiar with the national law of the country of the complainant.

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This morning I learned that Vladimir Putin gifted Egypt a Kalashnikov rifle on a state visit through Washington Post on Snapchat. Interesting to me was the fact that I paid full attention to this short tidbit of information due to the simple fact that I had to hold my finger down to my phone’s screen in order to watch the 10 second video, under the threat that release of my finger would cut my video off and would need to be restarted again.

Snapchat is a messaging/media sharing app which I call an ephemeral content provider (“ECP”) because it requires users to press and hold their mobile screen in order to view and continue viewing content such as pictures and short videos, which then self-destruct like a tape from Mission Impossible. Limited time is another characteristic of Snapchat: media either self-deletes 10 seconds after content is opened or is available for unlimited viewing for a 24 hour window, set by the content creator. But self-destruction always occurs.

Think about what this means at a basic level for content: fuller attention is being paid to the content. I have to actively do something to access information, and if I don’t pay attention it will disappear. Snapchat has assured content providers that when people take in content its platform, they are likely paying active attention to the content. They’ve done this by introducing scarcity to the content through Snapchat’s touch/hold/watch/disappear process for users to view content. Did I mention that in four years Snapchat has attracted 100 million monthly active users (MAUs)? For a reference point, Facebook reported 350 million MAUs in 2014.

All this hoopla aside, there are some interesting movements within the expansion ECPs which tug at some of the underpinnings to IP law, namely trademark law. One side effect of a consumer base accustomed to digesting self-deleting media is that advertising and brand infringement carry on as usual, maybe even more intensely, but the latter gains an advantage as a consequence disappearing tracks. Put in other words, the user base of an app like Snapchat is even more influenced by content, including infringing content, but the owners of infringed brands have less time to detect and react to infringement, and evidence gathering will also be more difficult. Imagine all increasing amount of subpoenas to access Snapchat data before data is deleted from their servers, a feature which is an express selling point of the Snapchat model.

There is support for the notion that people are paying attention to media distribution on Snapchat; some are even calling it a replacement of cable television. The “Discover” platform on Snapchat released January 27, 2015 as a designated portal for media content (in addition to the Snapchat “Stories” option). Discover launched with 11 publishers including CNN, The Daily Mail, and National Geographic, and the content operates similarly to the messaging app itself: stories are ephemeral. Content is published once a day and appear for one day only (in case you didn’t know, Snapchat messages are set to automatically delete after 3-10 seconds after viewed). Within Discover stories, more adspace is sold: BMW will advertise on CNN’s channel and T-mobile on The Daily Mail to name a few. This is already in addition to Snapchat’s 24-hour ad campaigns which sell for an unwavering $750,000 (McDonald’s and Samsung are in).

As a trademark lawyer, I think there are many implications which ephemeral media will have with IP law. DMCA is rendered useless because ephemeral content providers take down content at regular, short intervals; discovering potential infringement requires more, real-time monitoring; and evidence gathering will be hampered because the time between detection and action will be abbreviated. These issues will arise as more ECPs develop. I’d love to hear what you think and/or why you disagree below.